The child cried for both of them and would do so forever

“The child cried for both of them and would do so forever” is the haunting refrain at the heart of a story Martha tells at the Ila Centre. It describes a child’s grief for parents divided by war, but its force extends beyond the tale: elsewhere, a prisoner’s crying briefly calls a ghost story to Johnny’s mind, linking remembered loss to the fears of the present.

The story Martha tells

Martha attributes the tale to Grete, the manager at the Ila Centre. In the story, a woman’s partner is found dead after being left hanging from a lighthouse; later, his body disappears. The woman comes to believe that he returns at night and stands over the baby’s cot. The tale gives private grief a ghostly shape, but its human cause is confusion and loss rather than anything the story can verify as supernatural.

The woman does not know which side the child’s father served. According to the rumor Martha recounts, she retaliated against him for denying paternity by reporting him as a member of the Resistance to the Germans and as a spy to the Resistance. The child’s crying therefore belongs to a story in which adults’ divided allegiances and accusations outlast the relationship that produced the child.

The refrain and its ending

When other women complain about the baby’s crying and urge the mother to comfort the child, she replies that the child is crying for both parents and will do so forever. The line makes the sound more than an ordinary sign of distress: within the tale, it becomes an enduring expression of a loss the surviving parent cannot undo.

The story ends with the mother’s suicide. She is found in the attic, hanging from a roof beam; Martha notes that a pale stripe in the wood is said to mark where the rope was tied. This concrete remnant gives the legend a material trace, even as the haunting and the story’s other details remain reported as rumor. The child’s cry is thus preserved in Martha’s telling as the last, continuing consequence of a family’s destruction.

Echoes beyond the legend

The phrase also resonates in a scene involving Johnny and a boy in prison. Woken by crying, Johnny briefly thinks of the ghost and the baby before realizing that the sound comes from the boy on the bunk above him. The boy is trembling, and Johnny goes to him. The scene does not establish a literal connection between the prisoner and the child in Martha’s story; instead, the recalled legend shapes how Johnny initially interprets the sound.

Across these two contexts, crying carries what cannot be settled by explanation. Martha’s tale turns a child’s grief into a refrain passed from person to person, while Johnny’s momentary association shows how a story can make an immediate sound seem to belong to an older sorrow. The phrase’s persistence lies in that movement between legend and lived fear, rather than in any confirmed supernatural event.